Something of Myself

The Sea, The Sea

It feels a tad strange to write an entry after quite sometime. Went to visit a friend at St. Ives last weekend. It was so stunningly beautiful. For the benefit of the busy-bees, St. Ives is a sea-side town - sea, sea and more sea....ah, I fell in love with it. Shani's place overlooks the sea front and when you sit in the drawing room (which by the way is the best I have seen in my life) you can satiate your thirst by looking at the sea.

The sea does something to me. Stirs the insides of my being and summons me. I obey. It is almost as if she is like some oriental enchantress with cascade-like hair seducing me. My mind flutters from one rising wave to the next and when the waves crash onto the rocks it is quite simply tranquillity at its very loftiest.

It was then that I kept on thinking that dreams, like waves, crash and shatter when they hit the headland called reality.

However, with all this rising and crashing (no Freudian pun implied) it was so peaceful. Shani went for work during the day and most of the time I sat in the drawing room and watched the sea. I also managed to get to the top of a small island and viewed the now-green, now-pale-blue, and now-metallic sea...Then there was the horizon - concave, iterating the fact that the world is not flat. Small boats made their way, English kids screamed at the top of their voices and the adults were, for once, shouting and laughing and having a blast! (oops, forgot to mention the bastard seagulls - what a pain - gkhah, gkhah, gkhah...uffffffff)

Then there was Shani's place - a small, cosy flat but most beautifully decorated. If I had to pick a house to live in this would be the one. Impeccable choice of furniture, perfect matching bed-linen and curtains, post-modern paintings and wall-hangings, soothing pastel shades on the walls of the room and a neat library that left me wishing for more!

Anyway, like all good things in life, the weekend came to an end. I am now back to Exeter. I have almost finished my thesis. The whole writing thingy is done - what remains is the assimilation. I wonder how it will look when I put all the chapters together, type the contents page, paste the bibliography and sign the coversheet declaring - "Submitted by Anirban Roy to the University of Exeter as a dissertation towards the degree of Master of Arts in English Studies by advance study." Nice, innit? ;) There is contenment at the sense of closure. I still have work to do though, words to delete, sentences to polish and paragraphs to be aligned. All in good time baby, all in good time! ;)

Everyday I keep dreaming about my plane touching the runway of Calcutta airport - shit man, it's bad - only eight days before I fly...my heart is racing and I can feel the Kolkatar-chengda-chele feeling pulsating in my veins. I will hear Tagore songs again, I will board 3C/1 again, will see my favourite Goldfish again....Damn, it's great to think of home-coming...(or is it going?)

Well, whatever this life may hold for me, I hope I can live it to the fullest - never ever getting to a point where I say, "I could have done this" or "Only if I had done that".

Life is too short for regrets. If you want to do something, do it now, right here. Your life is what you make of it - that's what the sea told me and yes, she also said that life is like her, full of turbulent waves - wild and calm, rising and falling - a scheme of binaries.

I believed her.